Phil Spector, Pop Music Hitmaker Convicted of Murder, Dies at 81
Jan 18 2021, 7:16 AM
January 17 2021, 9:57 PM
January 18 2021, 7:16 AM
(Bloomberg) Phil Spector, the music producer who went from the Wall of Sound to the walls of a California prison cell, has died. He was 81.
(Bloomberg) Phil Spector, the music producer who went from the Wall of Sound to the walls of a California prison cell, has died. He was 81.
Spector died on Saturday morning at an outside hospital, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement on Sunday. A medical examiner from the San Joaquin County Sheriffâs Office will determine the official cause of death. TMZ reported that Spector died from Covid-related complications after being transferred from his prison cell.
Updated: 18 Jan 2021, 17:25
RECORD producer Phil Spector masterminded some of music’s biggest hits - but once told an interviewer: “I have devils inside that fight me.”
The man behind the ‘Wall of Sound’ - who died this weekend from Covid - would introduce himself as a genius but recognised he was prone to madness, adding: “I’m probably relatively insane.”
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Phil Spector called himself a genus but was plagued with mental health issuesCredit: Kobal Collection - Rex Features
Spector’s brutal killing of Lana Clarkson turned him from the “tycoon of teen” with a £22million fortune, to a murdering monster serving 19 years to life in jail.
Phil Spector, music producer convicted of murder, dies at 81 after contracting Covid-19
Music producer Phil Spector looks up during his murder trial in Superior Court July 10, 2007, in Los Angeles. (Gabriel Bouys-Pool/Getty Images/TNS)
LOS ANGELES For all the hit songs he drove up the charts, for all the power and wealth he amassed, for all the admiration he drew as he rearranged the pop music landscape, there was a darkness deep in Phil Spector’s soul that would forever shadow his genius.
Even as anthems such the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” erupted from radios across America, the acclaimed record producer was a brooding, manic man with a white-hot temper and a fondness for gunplay, all of which would manifest itself on a winter morning in 2003 when he fatally shot actress and nightclub hostess Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his castle-like mansion in Alhambra.
Phil Spector’s art created the world he couldn’t create for himself: a tortured, toxic and finally murderous man crafting hit after hit about idealized romance
But Spector was different. At the start, on The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him is To Love Him” a rephrasing of the epitaph from his father’s gravestone that Spector turned into a Hot 100 No. 1 in 1958 his sound was not so very far removed from the other recordings of the day, many of which carried the spacious aura of the rooms in which they were cut, investing early rock and pop with the mystical sense that new frontiers were being explored. Eventually though, he recognized how to make that aura the centerpiece of his records. You can hear how he did just that in the very first hit on Philles, The Crystals’ “There’s No Other Like My Baby” from 1962. Built like a rocket with three stages, it begins simply, with bass, guitar and voice rippling outward in stark echo before a piano part that seems borrowed from The Chantels 1958 classic “Maybe” lifts the song skyward with a burst of sound. Then chorus vocals, glockenspiel and strings continue the song’s journey tow